


all your friends are forgeries

by telekinesiskid



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: AU where K lives past the 4th, Choking, Coercion, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Kavinsky is his own warning, M/M, POV Second Person, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-21
Updated: 2017-04-13
Packaged: 2018-07-25 20:17:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 4
Words: 8,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7546337
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/telekinesiskid/pseuds/telekinesiskid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“And then your pack of dogs will rough us up?”</p><p>Kavinsky smiles and shakes his head. “Nope. As soon as I cark it, your friends will fall into comas so deep that not even you will be able to wake them, princess.”</p><p>“What the fuck are you talking about?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> HELLO I'M BACK, I'M STILL ALIVE AND KICKING (read as: writing)
> 
> so yeah. I'm gonna try to churn this story out because it's been in the works for a while, and it's been on my mind for a loooonng long time. so I'm gonna try to see it through and hopefully do a decent job. chaptered stuff is hard :(
> 
> thanks thanks to [my irl legal wife kiiouex](http://archiveofourown.org/users/kiiouex/pseuds/kiiouex) for beta'ing. she is Rare Pair queen and her writing is awesome - check it out :D

You can’t sleep. Not tonight, not any night.

Your younger brother is safe but you can’t rest knowing what happened to him. What almost happened to him.

You throw yourself out of bed, out from under a thin summer sheet and into the desaturated dark of your room. You cross the floor to the window and stand close – close enough to feel the bite of the cold glass, close enough for your breath to fog at it. It’s a cool night for late July. You’re only coated in one layer of dry sweat and for once you’ve been lying motionless rather than restless, not kicking up at humidity you can’t disperse, thick and airless.

Your hands never used to itch for anything more than a bottle to hold or a wheel to steer or a face to smash, but they itch for your phone now and you pull it out of your pocket: a place you hardly ever keep it. You catch the time – 02:23 – but it doesn’t stop you from punching out another txt to your brother. _You okay, shits rain?_

“Fuck,” you breathe, and your thumbs replay their steps, careful and meticulous, and you ignore any suggestions your predictive has on offer. You add an asterisk to ‘shitstain’ and hit send, but you already know that you’ve lost points in both nonchalance and punk-ness. You imagine your brother getting your text; spitting, uproarious with laughter, informing you that, hey, at least he’s proud that it wasn’t a blank txt. You imagine him cramming in several emojis that will show up only as squares. You imagine it will all arrive within seconds, in increments.

Instead, he sends you a solitary txt that reads ‘I’m fine’ and nothing else.

You breathe in through your nose and exhale, slow and noisy, press your hot forehead to the glass. Your eyes start to burn and you squeeze them closed, shutting it all out. You don’t know what to tell him. You’ve always been about as rubbish at consoling someone as you are at allowing yourself to be consoled. Minutes pass before you’ve rewritten a dozen responses, and you finally end the conversation with something lame like, _Go to bed._ A minute later and you follow it up with, _I love you._

You shove your phone back into your pocket, fish out the now-warm beer you’d apparently kept in the pouch of your hoodie. You unscrew the top and skol the rest of it, toss the bottle over your shoulder when you’re done. It hits your barely-covered mattress and falls to the ground; you wince at the sharp crack, and it rolls grittily along the floorboards. Your heart pounds, then eases back into a rhythm more manageable. You’re no stranger to loud, unidentifiable noises in the night, but now every sound is a bullet in your ear. You’ve been on edge ever since the fourth.

You still have the txts. You can still hear his voice in your head. _Are you coming to fourth? Are you coming? Are you coming? Do you need help coming?_

The fourth. The _fucking fourth._

You ram your head at the window until you stop thinking about it, but you don’t, and you can’t, so you keep knocking into the glass as your mind masochistically dredges it up, all of it – all of the emotions that single evening wrung out of you. The stress. The heart-stopping fear that you wouldn’t make it to your little brother, only a charred and butchered corpse of a boy. The bottomless grief that your family would be down another Lynch, that you would have to cry over another kin’s wax-like body, that you would have to sit through another funeral service in your childhood church all over again. The all-encompassing, head-pounding rage that this all happened because you wouldn’t let Kavinsky have you.

Your head makes one final smack and stops. There’s no sharp renewal of pain; a dull ache pulses in, makes you feel like your head is filled with too-much blood. Your breath catches and your heart gaps, trying to swallow up all it can, and you force yourself to get a grip before Gansey hears you. _He’s safe,_ you tell yourself, because you drove with Matthew yourself, and you watched Declan put him up in the dorms of a new academy, deep in the heart of D.C. _He’s safe,_ because K wasn’t even remotely around when you quietly moved all of Matthew’s things out of Aglionby on the fifth. _He’s safe,_ but no one is ever _safe,_ not from Kavinsky or anyone, and it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter—

Breathing does you no good. You need to let your car do the breathing for you.

You make a grab for your keys and throw open your door a fraction more cautiously than you normally would at almost-three in the morning. Gansey’s bedside lamp is on but he’s slumped, out cold over a small pile of musty books and his journal. You stop only so long to check his chest still rises and falls, as it should, and then you let your boots carry you across Monmouth to the exit. You bound down the stairs blindly and shove out the front door, letting it bang behind you, because you’re slowly imploding and everything you touch needs to shatter to not feel wrong.

The roads are almost dusky, the lots fanning out to either side of you like overgrown runways. A nearby street lamp flickers ominously, but that’s nothing new. What’s actually ominous is the white Mitsu parked beneath it. And the white singlet. And the white shoes. And the white glasses that somehow stay lit even when they’re thrown into dark.

Your chest tightens.

“ _Lynch,_ ” K calls from across the street, and the way his voice carries across the empty lot makes him sound like he’s all around you. You can see his grin from here – there’s a lot less blood in it than when you last saw it – and you carefully watch the way he postures himself, like he thinks this is all still a bit fun, a bit of harmless flirting, retribution mistaken for reciprocation. Freshly scabbed-over burns peek out from his neck, from over his shoulders. The skin on his arms is still pink and raw from where he grazed it on the road. He looks like shit, but he still looks good for a guy who’s lucky not to be paralyzed from the neck down.

Your eyes don’t move him away from him. You watch unblinking as he blows out a column of smoke before he slips his joint back between his lips. He beckons you over with two crooked, bandaged fingers and your blood runs hot, hot, hot. You drop the keys into your pocket and your hands ball into white-knuckle fists as you start to walk over. You couldn’t kill him back then, and you know you can’t do it now, but that doesn’t mean you can’t beat the shit out of him.

“Hey man,” he greets when you close most of the distance between you both, lazy and conversational. “How’s it hangin’?”

Whether he sees your punch coming or not, he doesn’t deflect it. He takes the full brunt of it, from his cheekbone to his nose; his head snaps to the side as his shades fly off his face, clattering to the asphalt. You revel in how _good_ it feels – the fire in your bones, the pound of your heart, the dizzying rush of adrenaline and _hate_ and righteousness – and yet the scratch doesn’t seem to alleviate the itch. You watch for a moment as he pauses, shocked. He spits up blood, faces you with reddened eyes surrounded by panda-dark bruising. Kavinsky has always looked like a boy who doesn’t eat, doesn’t sleep, doesn’t wash, doesn’t flinch nor hesitate nor regret, but today it’s worse. He looks like a boy who just _doesn’t._

Without his shades, you can easily parse the expression that moves across his face. You always hated staring into his shades and only seeing your own pitiful self. He flashes you something approaching an admittance of guilt. “Ok, ok, I probably had that coming. That one was a freebie – just for you, Lynch. So anyway, how about—”

He sees the next blow coming a millisecond too late and fails to dodge it. It lands a little lower on his face, and you feel the crack of his jaw as much as you hear it. He’s flung to the ground like a rag-doll, and when he scrambles to get back up, it’s with blood on his lip and a snarl in his voice.

“Well your bro didn’t fuckin’ _die,_ did he?”

“No thanks to you,” you respond, gritted, icy, and you raise your boot so it just hovers over that pathetic face you never want to see again. “You demonic _piece of sh—_ ”

He grabs your foot faster than you can bring it down on his nose; he flips you to land on your shoulder, hard enough to pop it out of its socket. You hiss at the impact, and you choke out a small cry as you reach up for the Mitsu’s wing-mirror and your shoulder painfully slides back into place. You try to pull yourself up quick, but you’re thrown flat back onto the tarmac with Kavinsky’s weight straddled over you, a hand placed too snugly across your throat.

Kavinsky pants triumphantly, licks at the blood on his lip before it can trail down his chin. He bares his teeth in an unfriendly smile and there’s red peeking between his teeth. If he’s at all in pain from your blows, he doesn’t show it. The hand on your throat squeezes until you choke, until all you can think about is how much you don’t want to just hand him the satisfaction of taking your life.

“As I was sayin’ before you so fuckin’ rudely interrupted me, Lynch… How’s about you and me pick up where we left off?”

You’re not surprised. If anything, you’re surprised Kavinsky has the balls to ask for anything more romantic than a fist up his ass. You want him to let up on his hold enough for you to release a long, loud string of obscenities that would have your mother turning over in her coma, but Kavinsky doesn’t give you the chance. Instead you choke out, “When hell freezes over.”

He grins back. “Let’s go fuckin’ ice-skating then.”

Your limbs rip free from where he had them pinned between bone and asphalt, and you wrestle his hand away from your neck. You can finally inflate your chest enough to tell him, “I said fucking no back then. In what goddamn fucking universe do you think you trying to kill my brother would change that?”

The smile falls from Kavinsky’s face but it’s quick to twitch back into place. He clears his throat – presumably of blood, because his breath now reeks of it. He continues to push you and hold you down as he reaches for his white-rimmed shades and slips them back over his face. One lens is cracked, sat lopsided across his nose, but it just suits his broken face all the more.

“Here’s the deal, Lynch,” he starts, far too casual. “You’re gonna be mine or I’ll put your friends in comas.”

You stare, face frozen in revulsion. It’s delivered without ceremony, without flare, without any kind of nefarious suspense. It doesn’t feel like he means it, but the stony pit of your stomach warns you that he does.

“Bullshit,” you mumble, cold all over. You hope he can’t feel your heartbeat pounding in your neck, where his fingers are still trying to press in pretty bruises.

“Don’t call bullshit on this one, Lynch,” he says, shaking his head back and forth. “You’ll just get all pissy with yourself when you’re at their bedsides, trying to hold three hands all at once. Trust me on this.” He dips his head forward so he can peer at you over the rims. The whites of his eyes are red, his pupils so dilated you can’t see a speck of colour in them. “And you know why I’ll do it? ‘Cos if you say no to me one more time, I’ll kill myself.”

As much as you really don’t want it to, you feel your stomach turn over. You feel your body quietly protest. As much as you know you and everyone you love would be better off with Kavinsky’s OD’d and blood-spattered remains six feet under, you try and fail to wish it upon him.

“What,” you mutter, “and then your pack of dogs will rough us up?”

Kavinsky smiles and shakes his head. “Nope. As soon as I cark it, your friends will fall into comas so deep that not even _you_ will be able to wake them, princess.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

He leans in, close to your face, dried-out lips a mere inch from scraping against yours. Less than a month ago, you dreamt for just one taste of him – of blood and salt, of skin and teeth, of drug-sweet and pill-bitter, of burning rubber and stale smoke and cheap vodka and _Kavinsky_ , _Kavinsky, Kavinsky._ Now you turn your mouth away. He settles for your cheek instead, planting a kiss so small and tender on you that it makes you feel sick. If he’s going to kiss you anyway, you’d rather he’d do it properly and tear your face open with it.

He softly runs his nails down one side of your face. He says, voice light, “Your friends are dead, Lynch. I made them. They’re reborn. I, uh, don’t even know if Proko’s still my favourite forgery. I thought I did an impeccable job of Dick Three. Don’t you? He’s been up and about for a week now and you haven’t noticed anything off about him. My forgeries just keep getting better and better and better. Right? Lynch?”

He sinks his nails into your cheek for your attention, but he can’t have it.

You wouldn’t want to give him your attention even if you could.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ahhahahah I did it I finally wrote another chapter!!! I think we'll be back on track now, hopefully :') I've had the next chapter half-finished for....... like. half a year, oh my god. so maybe that won't take much to fix up??
> 
> much thanks to my beautiful wife and beta [kii](http://archiveofourown.org/users/kiiouex/pseuds/kiiouex) (tho I did rewrite the end of this chap, so if it seems kinda dodge it's because I was writing without reins lmao)

Blue arrives first. One second Gansey’s an ashen monument to his usual valiant self and the next he’s at the door, head bowed, all concerned murmurs and rustling coats. You didn’t even hear her knock. You wonder if she even did. Maybe the wall of silence between you and Gansey this past half-hour just made her approach all the louder for him. Maybe he’s already so in tune to the sound of her boots hitting Monmouth’s stairwell, like you’re so in tune to the sound of the Evo’s wheels squealing outside your window. Maybe you didn’t hear her because your head is far from quiet, crowded with confusion and scepticism and a noise like a vacuous, distant roar that makes you feel cold all over. _Your friends are dead, Lynch. Let’s go fuckin’ ice-skating._ He’s like an STD in your head.

Peripheral movement catches your eye; you watch Blue as she moves across Monmouth’s dusty floors. She comes into your frame of vision to look out the factory bay windows and you scrutinise the patch-work quilted dress she’s wearing, complete with a host of technicolour beads woven into the frayed hems. Part of you wants to snap at her what a hideously tacky and homemade thing it is, and that’s the part of you that you cling to; a buoy of normality in an ocean of everything else. You want to ask if she always so blatantly dresses in the dark, but your tongue sits fat and numb in your mouth and you can barely breathe around it, let alone speak around it. When she turns around she meets your stare, but you glance away before she can hold it.

The whispers start up, like they think you can’t hear, even when they’re right beside you. You catch snippets of them – “Where was he?” “Outside.” “What happened?” “Kavinsky.” “Oh…” – and a harsh swell mounts in your chest, your breathing thrown out of rhythm. _You_ were the one who told Gansey to call her here, but now you wish that she wasn’t – that no one had ever noticed her at _Nino’s_ , that Adam had never tried to date her, that Gansey had never cemented her place in the group. But it’s too late; she’s involved now. Kavinsky had specified three friends and, even for a master forger, creating convincing copies of the dead is impossible.

Though, if anyone was to have the cure for death, you were sure to find it somewhere under the backseat of his Mitsu.

 

Adam arrives second. Noah doesn’t arrive at all.

Like you, Adam has been awake for hours, but unlike you, he’s accomplished significantly more in the small hours of a Tuesday morning than you have in your entire week. Still, he looks like an extra out of a George A. Romero film; the dark circles under his eyes are near-comical and his gait as he walks over to you is tired, tired, tired. He shows up in grease-stained work-issue coveralls, his school uniform no doubt carefully folded and tucked into the heavy bag slung over his shoulder. It drops like a boulder to his feet. “So,” he says, and looks around. You’re not the only one who flinches; the first real voice spoken above a whisper pierces every ear in Monmouth. “What happened then?”

No one says anything. You don’t have to turn your head to know they’re all looking at you.

“Well?”

You can’t answer; you’re too distracted by how different it is. You’ve been in similar formations a hundred times before but today it feels different, being here, with them. You don’t feel that quiet anymore, those small comforts, that kind of easy invincibility that comes with being amongst friends. Nothing feels _right_ about this. You feel sick. You feel like the world is off-kilter, just noticeably titled. You feel like someone’s moved all the furniture an inch to the left. You feel like you’re sitting in a room full of imposters identical to your loved ones, and it’s…

Distracting.

“Lynch.”

You need another minute to think, to readjust, but Adam doesn’t afford you that luxury. He needs answers – he _deserves_ answers. It’s your fault that he’s here. The fact that he would even think to come for you, just because you _asked,_ it just…

You fail to keep a wince in check as he kicks the side of your armchair. Your stony-faced silence isn’t any more worrying than it is irritating. _“Ronan._ Tell me why I left work early for this.”

You swallow, try to loosen your tongue, try to unclench your hands from the armrests. You try to shove what feels like a broken nuclear reactor into a thimble and crane around the side of the armchair to face them. Part of your heart wilts, part of your heart steels. For all the time you’ve had, you don’t have a speech prepared. You don’t even know what it is you really want to ask. You just open your mouth and hope that, eventually, like every test you’ve ever taken, something right will come out.

“What,” you pause to clear your throat, “What did you all do when I was gone? I mean…” Your eyes find the black rafters as a frustrated sigh cuts out of you. “When I was… in D.C., from the fifth onward. I was gone for a couple of weeks. What did you all… do?”

You look back at them. Gansey tilts his head, Blue pulls a face, and Adam’s clipped response of, “Work,” only serves to remind you like a brick to the face that this is a waste of everyone’s time and patience. You know it’s a stupid question – just as you know that any hesitance to answer on their part isn’t indicative of a run-in with Kavinsky – but a snarl still buds in the back of your throat and you’re ready to tell them all to fuck off, to clear out, because you can’t stand the idea that _these are not your friends._

“We didn’t do anything noteworthy, Ronan,” Gansey says. He raises one shoulder in a shrug. It’s such a commonplace Gansey gesture, and yet you find yourself scouring your memory for any evidence you’ve seen him shrug like that before. “We just…”

He looks to Blue for help, but all she says is, “I worked, too.”

Your molars bite together. The silence is so loud, but you try to get to the point. “Did… any of you… see him. Kavinsky.”

 _“God,_ no,” Blue blurts.

“He was in hospital,” Gansey mumbles, all the compassion suddenly drained from his voice, from his eyes. It’s a deadened kind of expression that makes you wonder if he feels bad for not feeling bad. “I watched him fly several feet through the air after he was hit by Prokopenko’s Golf. Not even Kavinsky can walk that off.”

A smile almost breaks your face open. Your heart’s beating too fast. “Are you kidding? Kavinsky can walk _death_ off.”

“I’m sorry,” Adam shakes his head and opens out his palms, baffled and appalled, “ _Why_ are we talking about Kavinsky?” He looks from Gansey to Blue to you. You think you see his eyes darken with every moment that passes, but it could just as easily be blamed on the poor light. “What do you care about Kavinsky?”

You don’t miss the accusation in his tone. It turns your fidgety hands back into split-knuckled fists. “I _don’t_ ,” you hiss back.

“Then _why are we here?”_

You want to snap. Kavinsky’s pulled on you too hard and you desperately, egregiously want to show someone the consequences. You want to shout into the sky, to haul every piece of furniture you can lift halfway across the planet, to shatter these factory windows and dive out in a rain of broken glass, with only slim promises that you’ll crack your head open when you hit the pavement and Kavinsky will finally be _gone_.

You throw yourself out of the armchair and round on him, face dark, joints and muscles throbbing from your previous scrap. Adam barely flinches, like he already knows it’s nothing more than the threat display of a provoked animal, and his expression hardens. You try to let the impulse to lash out roll over you, to ease the violence in through your nose and out through your mouth, but then you’re looking at Adam – _Adam_ – and something in you pulls, like a muscle, like a heartache, in the opposite direction. All you can think is _not Adam, God please, not Adam,_ and then the lava in your blood cools, turns to ash and crumples away. Just a breath of wind would knock you off your feet.

You turn away, a hand fast to scrub at your face and your burning eyes. Your chest wants to push sobs out your throat but you won’t let it; you just stand there, still and quiet.

He doesn’t understand. None of them do. You can’t hold it against him that he doesn’t have the time for you to make him understand.

“Gansey,” you hear him murmur in the backdrop, “If we’re done here, then I need to get back to work. I said I’d have this Cadillac fixed and—”

“It’s okay, Adam. Go. I’m sorry for the inconvenience.”

The very idea that you’re an inconvenience to Adam Parrish pains you in a way that doesn’t quite feel like pain. You feel like your bones are being whittled down to nothing beneath your skin.

You hear quiet footsteps, curt goodbyes, Monmouth’s stairwell door opening and closing.

Gaudy colours flash at the corner of your eye and you know that Blue is still here. You know it’s only as assistance to Gansey, because like hell she would ever stay for you after all you’ve made her welcome these past few months. You feel her come up on your left, Gansey on your right, and they worry over you like you’re their goddamn son who’s just lost a pet.

The familiar weight of Gansey’s hand lays heavy on your quaking shoulder. It still smarts from the impact it took not an hour earlier. “Was that all you wanted to talk about?” Gansey asks gently. “Kavinsky?”

You hate his name on Gansey’s lips; you shrug his hand off of you. You want Kavinsky’s name spat with venom or not uttered at all. You speak as clearly as you can around the fiery ache in your throat to ask, “You’re sure you didn’t seem him?”

“Positive.”

“If I’d served him I would’ve spat in his food,” Blue says.

You breathe out unsteadily. You want to face them. You want to turn around and look into their eyes and just _know,_ somehow, that they’re either imitations or unscathed originals. You wouldn’t even know where to start but you can’t stop thinking about it. What if you quizzed them on their personal histories? What if you hunted down every scar and freckle on their bodies that Kavinsky wouldn’t know about? What if you sat down with them, one by one, and forced them to recite the events of the past two weeks until they hit a blank, a few hours that they couldn’t account for?

You doubt you’d get anywhere. Kavinsky’s forgeries are notorious.

Sometimes, not even Proko believes he’s really dead.

Gansey softly prompts, “Ronan?” and you can’t do it; you can’t spend another minute in his company without those colliding waves of grief and fear and heartache and revulsion. You turn and weave around him, eyes forward, storming for your bedroom. Exhaustion is laying into you like a second round with Kavinsky; you can feel bruises blossoming on your neck, you can feel your muscles sing in protest with every sharp move. You drawl, “Thanks for your support, Dick and Jane,” all emotion stamped out of your tone, and you slam the door behind you. Finally, you can focus, and it doesn’t take another minute to find your ground.

The truth is this: they are your friends.

Even if Kavinsky made them, they are still your friends.

But, for your sake, you need to know which it is. You’re not still stuck in the same dark place as Kavinsky. You won’t let him slowly destroy you anymore.

Your phone thrums in your pocket. You dig it free, holding out a little hope that Matthew has a stupid txt for you, but it’s from an unknown number. Of course. You’d blocked Kavinsky’s old one.

Your blood runs cold as you force your reluctant eyes to read it: _Dinner tomorrow?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope.. this is heading in a direction you guys are keen to see ?? you can find me over at [tumblr](http://telekinesiskid.tumblr.com/) ;o


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> quick question: what is the american equivalent of maccas (mc donalds) ? my wife and I tried to look it up but alas, no luck ???
> 
> as always, [kii](http://archiveofourown.org/users/kiiouex/pseuds/kiiouex) has fulfilled her wifely duties and beta'd my stories :') she's a good egg

It’s the sickest sham of a date you’ve ever seen, and you’ve seen plenty. You’ve seen _The Bachelor_. You’ve seen your twelve year-old brother take a girl he hardly knows to the films, just because all his friends were doing it. You know a disastrously fake, forced relationship when you see one, and you hope that everyone in the surrounding booths at _Nino’s_ can see it, too.

Kavinsky, though. Kavinsky probably thinks it’s going well, even when it’s been seven minutes and you’ve yet to say a single word to him. The fact that you even showed up at all is probably proof enough to him that you want to be here. Never mind the fact that he had to threaten both his own and your friends’ lives just to draw you out here.

You stare him down now, just a couple of short feet across from you, yet still out of reach for your hands to close around his neck. He’s so much of a fuckboy that he looks out of place, like he got lost on his way to a nightclub and wandered into a diner by mistake. A sign by the counter plainly reads _No shirt, No shoes, No service,_ but Kavinsky doesn’t even pass that test ninety percent of the time; it’s no small miracle that he passed it today. He’s dressed in a white muscle tee that hasn’t been washed in weeks, and white-gold top-siders with blood and sick and God knows what else still spattered on them. Even indoors he still proudly sports his white-rimmed shades, and you have to wonder if it’s to uphold the illusion that he’s far too cool to let anyone penetrate his soul as deeply as he penetrates theirs, or if it’s for practicality’s sake. The fluorescents are that bright in this place; maybe it hurts his eyes to be anywhere that’s not the dim interior of a car. An entire summer of sun and flares and explosives and pyrotechnics and basement-made moonshine must’ve finally taken its toll and burned out his retinas. You can’t even remember what his eyes used to look like, before he started wearing those shades. Maybe the blood-shot quality of them isn’t the result of a blunt too many; maybe that’s just their natural state now.

Nothing about your body language says you’re here of your own free will. You’re as leant away from him as you possibly can be. Your chin’s pointed down, your nails set firm into the thighs of your jeans. Your furious eyes bore into him like you’re watching a black hole swallow up time and matter and light.

He’s not surprised by your attitude and he doesn’t let it spoil his good mood either. He grins at every waitress that staunchly pretends not to notice him, and you have to wonder just how many of these girls know who he is and wish he were banned. He lazily raises a pauper’s arm weighed down by a prince’s jewels to hail the next waitress who passes by. He leans out of the booth, starts, “’Scuse me, sweetheart—” but she doesn’t even slow.

He pulls back into the booth, hopes dashed. He stares after her and clicks his tongue like it’s just typical. You hear him mutter, “Whose fuckin’ junk do I have to lick to get some decent service around here?”

Your nostrils flare. You don’t want to _help_ Kavinsky, after all the misery he’s caused you – after all the misery he’s still causing you – but you don’t want to see him step up his game for attention and ruin a nice family establishment either. You work it out; the sooner you cooperate, the sooner you can leave, and you bitterly raise your arm for the next waitress that flies out of the kitchen.

Your stomach turns a few somersaults when you see her. The hideous plaid pants, the garbage bottle-top shirt, her scathingly approachable work-mode face. It had completely slipped your mind that Blue works here.

You try to make like you were just running a hand over your shaved head but it’s seconds too late; she’s already made eye-contact with you and changed routes to answer your beckon. Your heart pounds as she walks over, a little notebook and pencil already poised in her hand.

“Hey Ronan,” she greets, too tired to put much heart into it. You don’t say hello back. You sit ashamed and full of dread as her eyes turn over to your companion, and she suddenly, fiercely frowns like she knows exactly who he is. She looks back to you, her face utterly appalled, and you’re thankful that she’s too professional to say what she thinks about this to your face. She scrapes her expression back into something half-neutral to ask, “Can I take your order?”

“Sure you can, sweetheart,” Kavinsky coos back, and you shoot him a withering look that mirrors Blue’s. He picks up the shabby menu like he’s only just realised it’s there. “I’ll have the, uh… _fuck_ yes, get me some fuckin’ _crepes._ ”

Blue sighs nosily. “That’s on our breakfast menu.”

Kavinsky pauses. “So?”

Blue pauses, too, and it reads like a moment of silence to her lost patience. _“So,”_ she says, through her teeth, “we don’t serve breakfast at ten o’clock at night. Try _this_ side,” she offers, not kindly, as she takes the menu and turns it over for him. You just shake your head at him.

“He doesn’t know what food is,” you murmur to Blue, by way of apology, and she gives the barest scoff in response.

“Get me a beef burger then,” Kavinsky says, oblivious. “Take out the mayo, put in some gherkin, buncha fries. And a Pepsi.” He pushes the menu into her hands before she’s even finished taking down the order; the plastic digs into her arm until she snatches it up from him. Kavinsky’s eyeless gaze turns back to you and he points, like you’re up next. “What’ll you have, Lynch?”

“Water.”

“Come on, man, don’t be this way – let me treat you. Just pick a fuckin’ food.”

“I’m not hungry,” you grit out, and you feel some tension enter his face as he coolly stares back at you. An uneasy silence hangs in the air, clouding your headspace with _red._ Frustration gets at you like a hidden layer of skin you can’t peel back, like worms you can’t scratch away. Like a challenge you can’t rise to.

Blue doesn’t wait for it to pass. “Okay, whatever. There’s a twenty-minute wait in the kitchen but I’ll bring you your drinks.” As she turns to leave, she flashes you a crossly bewildered expression that you can only interpret as, _what the hell are you doing with him?_ You don’t have an answer for her; you just lower your eyes and let her walk away.

Kavinsky cranes around to watch her – specifically one part of her – leave. “ _Damn,_ ” he breathes, and your hands curl and uncurl in your lap, undecided if you want to be ready for a brawl or not. He turns his face back to you, his smile all teeth that will be rotted out in just a few short years, should he ever make it past twenty-one. You tell your hands to relax because it’s nothing new. He always looks at people like he’d just love to fuck them, or kill them, or – in your specific case – both. “You boys share her then?”

_“Fuck off,”_ you snarl, and Kavinsky holds up both hands like you have him at gunpoint.

“No, no, I get it,” he says. “Three of you, one of her. It’s her harem. How very _feminist_ of you, Lynch.”

You flash him a severe look that promises you’ll seize his hair and smash his head into the nearest wall if he says another word about Blue. You’re fiercely defensive of her in a way assholes like Kavinsky need you to be. “Shut. The fuck. Up.”

He smiles at you like he wants you to make him. “Y’know, Lynch… let me tell you a little something—share a little wisdom with you about being a master forger. To be a master forger… you have to get the details _just_ right. All the little nicks and oddities— you have to know all that shit, through and through. When you take something, you have to know what it _is_ you’re taking.” He pushes around the salt shaker on the table like he’s never seen one before, like he can’t believe it would be full of any substance other than coke. “You have to see it, you have to _feel_ it, you have to memorise every inch of it. You have to _learn_ that shit. If you know what I’m saying.”

Your head aches by now; you’ve spent the entire time here just _scowling,_ but still your scowl deepens. You’re sure you’ve never spent so much energy on anything in your entire life than you have hating Joseph Kavinsky and every word that slips past his lips. He stares at you for a moment, steady and pensive, waiting for you to catch on, but the truth is that you don’t know what he’s saying.

He figures as much because he presses on, scarred eyebrows raising over the rim of his shades. A smile cracks at the corner of his face. “I had to… spend a _long_ time, getting all the details just right. _Learning_ them.” He jabs a thumb over his shoulder, back at the kitchen where Blue disappeared. “I had to learn that bitch quite a few times—”

Your endurance snaps. You lunge for him, hands clawing for his face, but his reflexes are quick when he means to goad you; he sticks a fork in your arm faster than you see him pick it up. Pain jolts then moves through you, slows you down for just a second, but it’s not nearly enough to drown out another wave of _hate._ You throw yourself after him as he scrambles to vacate the booth and you both come crashing hard to the floor on sore elbows and knees and shoulder blades.

All around you, families and couples are hustling out of their seats or craning to watch, but you can’t stop yourself. Everything you’ve been holding back until now is just pouring out of you and you want to _murder_ Kavinsky for even implicating that he’s killed your friends, that he’s fucked with them, that he’s carelessly replaced them as if the prototypes weren’t irreplaceable. As if it were all just a proud testament to his craftsmanship.

You hold his arms down, you crawl on top of him. Tears burn like acid in your eyes; you want to scream like an animal, right in his face, your rawest emotions that can never be put into words. Some part of you still remembers where you are, though, and you communicate with your hands instead like that’s any better. You choke him; you fit your hands around his pale, thin neck and you squeeze the hardest you’ve ever dared to squeeze anyone’s neck before, and for just a moment you think that you can do this. You stare down at the blank, reflective surface of his shades, the tireless grin of his mouth, and you make a tight ring around his throat, squeezing until either something breaks or he stops trying to laugh.

You’re not expecting someone to blindside you; they smash into your body and tackle you to the floor, sprawling you out and holding you there. Whoever it is has clearly had some kind of training because the hold is firm but not lethal, too confident, not the work of an average civilian. The pressure of it forces your head to clear and the red pulse starts to subside; you blink up at the overhead fluorescents as you listen to Kavinsky splutter and wheeze in the backdrop. The weight leaves your body and the man who restrained you throws you back up onto your unsteady feet. A lady yells at you and Kavinsky to leave.

You take a moment. You keep your head down as folks part an exit route for you, Kavinsky just a few feet behind, still struggling for breath. Blue stands at the door to the kitchen with Kavinsky’s Pepsi and your water in hand. Her eyes are creased with anger and worry when you meet them, but you just shake your head at her. _This isn’t your problem._

You leave _Nino’s_ , just as you’re informed by a disembodied voice that you’ve been banned, and the door slams behind you. Your heart sinks into your upset stomach. Gansey is going to be so disappointed in you.

Kavinsky throws a casual arm around your shoulder, like you hadn’t just been fuelled with enough senseless hate to choke him to death. “Fuck ‘em, Lynch,” he says, all cheery camaraderie. His rasping, hoarse voice makes your skin crawl. _I almost killed him and he doesn’t even care._ “ _Nino’s_ is a shithole anyway. Let’s just… fuckin’ get take-out.” He pauses to cough and when you shove him off you he almost stumbles to the ground. He catches himself – barely – and drags in a breath that sounds like his lungs have been through a cheese grater. “I’m still… feelin’ that burger. How’s Maccas?”

Your turn away from him, wipe what mess you’d made of your face away with your sleeve. You’re shaking, your heart’s pounding, your head’s on fire. You almost killed him—you _wanted_ to kill him. You don’t want to think about what would’ve happened if you’d done it with an audience, if another human had slackened beneath your hands, if Blue had collapsed into a dreamless coma, right in front of you. If all your friends did.

Your wipe your sleeve across your face again.

“Lynch?” Kavinsky smacks your arm. _“Ro.”_

You only make it a few steps toward your BMW before you dry-retch into the parking lot.

Kavinsky rasps out a laugh from behind you, still there, still always there. “You’re a real… fuckin’ lousy date, you know that? You’d better put out for me.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> s/o to BookSlut1994 for reminding me that I had a thing going here - I'm gonna do my darndest to finish it, even if it's a bit rough and not as coherent as I would've liked. we're just gonna have to agree that I could've started this fic off a lot better than I did, but I was a fool... an imbecile
> 
> also a small PSA: do not... under any circumstances... think to yourself 'oh yeah I know what happens next and I'm literally days out from writing it, I have no need to note it down'... and then proceed to put your fic on hiatus for half a year... because you will probably forget... and be very mad at yourself... when you have no indication of what your plans were... psa over
> 
> ty to the lovely [kiiouex](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiiouex/pseuds/kiiouex) for beta'ing

You jolt from a sleep you weren’t even aware you were slipping into; you sit up, pry your eyes back open. They flick over to the time on your car stereo. Almost twelve o’clock. You’ve been waiting here almost an hour; you have no idea if Nino’s really closes at eleven thirty or if it’s just the time the staff choose to kick you out at because, honestly, who wants to deal with a bunch of rowdy teens who are clinically unable to sleep and set their own curfews. Your nails scratch absently at the three dents in your arm where Kavinsky stabbed you with a fork; it’s no surprise to you that, of all the potential weapons available to him both at the diner _and_ in his pocket, he went for the thing shaped like a trident. Of course. You’re not really joking around anymore when you call him the devil.

Fox Way is just like every other quiet suburban street at midnight, save for a few peeling, splintered bungalows here, and a few abandoned rusted trikes there. Only a couple of homes still have lit-up windows, including Sargent’s, which is precisely why you’re parked a few crooked letterboxes down, sitting in the dark. The only thing that keeps you sane as you wait are the _Deep Purple_ CDs your father left in the glove compartment. Your phone lies somewhere in the backseat, dismantled and dead, because you don’t want to know just how many times Kavinsky has tried to call since you ran for your car and sped away before he could even catch his breath.

Your forehead has started to rest a little too long on the wheel by the time you hear an old pick-up truck pull up to 300, and then your head snaps up. Under the light of the orange streetlamp, you watch a very tired Blue shuffle out of the back and sling a satchel that’s on its last legs over her shoulder. You wait, hand fastened over the handle, until the truck has rumbled a good distance away. Then you throw open the door and sprint into the road.

_“Maggot!”_ you half-hiss, half-shout. She stops a few feet from her front door, turns, blinks her surprise to see you of all people there. You frantically try to wave her over to your car. _“Sargent! C’mere!”_

Dubious as she is – given the side she saw of you tonight, she has every right to be – she walks over to you and your shadily parked vehicle, clutching her bag with both hands as if there’s something inside it she knows she can use to hurt you with. You would rather she didn’t, since you’ve already been body slammed by a marine today and you’re still a little jumpy.

“What the _fuck,_ Lynch?” she hisses when she’s closer. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“I need your help,” you say. It comes out a lot cleaner, easier than you thought it would; asking for help is not something you do well, and never in such plain and recognisable words. “We gotta talk.”

She sighs and checks her plastic watch. It’s Mike Wazowski green. “It’s _midnight.”_

“So?”

“So I don’t get up at four in the afternoon like you. This isn’t the middle of my day; this is the end of it. I’ll help you later.”

She starts to turn but you rush around to cut her off. She frowns her immense disapproval at you and then you do something you knew you would probably, despicably, have to do: you grovel. “Please,” you mumble, clasping your hands together. “Please. Look… you’re the fucking amp.”

“Amp?”

“Amplifier. You have to…” You pause, your mind drifting, because you’ve had hours to think of a plan, and yet you always found yourself thinking about your friends, limp, defiled, stuffed into the trunk of a Mitsu, like bracken for a bonfire, and then you can’t think much of anything. Your eyes refocus on Blue. “I can’t work this shit out with Gansey or Adam, okay? I need you.”

That raises her eyebrows. The very idea that you, the aloof bastard, the one barrier left to true assimilation into Gansey’s court, need her help over everyone else’s.

She hesitates, but eventually concedes. “Okay. You got fifteen minutes.”

You breathe out. It’s enough.

She follows you to your BMW and slinks into the passenger side, checking the floor is free of whatever she expects to be down there before dropping her bag. “First off,” she says, opting to look out the windshield rather than at you, which you appreciate, “What the fuck was that about with Kavinsky? You know you guys are banned now, right?”

A sigh cuts out from between your teeth. You don’t much care for Nino’s; it’s the thought of disappointing Gansey that crushes you. “Yeah.”

She picks at the loose threads in her shirt’s hem, still looking forward. “I heard from Gansey that you used to race him. Spent a lot of time with him this summer. That you guys had a really… weird, tumultuous thing going on, and it worked for you. I get that—I get fun but fucked up relationships. I just thought you would’ve stopped after… you know. Fourth.”

Your mouth feels dry. You swallow and swallow but the cottonmouth feeling isn’t going away. “Yeah. Well…” You don’t know what to say, where to start. Whether she’ll even believe forgeries can be this good. “Listen, I called you all over yesterday because… he told me that…” You look out your driver’s window, try to keep it together. Your heart races like you’re about to admit a secret you’re not ready to share with the world. “You know about Proko, right?”

“Proko?”

“That he died. And K made another one.”

“I… didn’t know you guys could make people,” Blue says, like she can sort of see where this conversation is heading and doesn’t like it at all. “I don’t know if that’s magical or terrifying.”

“It’s both. And look… That’s his thing, right? He a forger. He forges IDs and merch, he forges drugs, he forges people. He told me he forged you guys.”

Blue’s head turns sharply to you. “Us?”

“Yeah, you. Gansey and Parrish too.” You shake your head, hold up your hands helplessly. You can’t meet her eye for more than a couple of seconds. “I don’t know if he’s just next-level fucking with me, but… that’s what he told me. Also said if I didn’t do what he wanted, he’d kill himself. Which is bad enough, I guess, but... Don’t suppose you know what happens to dream people when their maker dies?”

“They die too?”

You scoff. “Christ, Sargent, no hesitation. Close enough; they sleep. Forever. Like a coma.”

“Shit,” she murmurs, awed, and then casts furtive, nervous glances at you like she’s managed to put two and two together and feels compelled to offer her sympathies on an event she wasn’t even around for. “You’ve… seen it happen before,” she says instead.

You nod once.

“God.” She throws herself back in the seat, bouncing her skull on the headrest. There’s that many stray clips and things in her hair; you’re surprised the slightest pressure doesn’t drive them in like nails. “So… you’re telling me that I’m possibly dead. And also a forgery of myself?”

“I guess so, maggot.”

She bits her lip and holds out a hand to inspect it of any new marks or disfigurements. She’s not making it into the terrible tragedy that you are, that you thought she would. “Damn good forgery then,” she mutters.

“The best. You noticed any missing scars or birthmarks?”

She points to an uneven patch of lighter skin on her forearm. “This one’s accounted for.”

“Eh, too noticeable. Don’t you have anything small? Like a freckle in your ear or something?”

She pulls a face. “I don’t really keep track of that kind of stuff. Sorry.”

“Yeah. No one fucking does.” You exhale sharply and allow your forehead to smack into the top of the wheel. It’s not an invitation for her to pat your back comfortingly, and you’re glad that she doesn’t. “ _Fuck_. I miss Noah.”

Blue hums. She smiles, and then her smile droops in a way that makes you think you and Noah aren’t the only two who share something special. “I miss him too. It’s been weeks.”

“If he was here then we could have this shit sorted out in a heartbeat. Now I’ve gotta… fucking sleuth it out myself.”

“So what exactly do you want _me_ to do?”

“I don’t know. Something. Think of a plan.”

She throws up her hands. “What plan? I don’t know this dream stuff half as well as you. Can’t you just… I know this isn’t really your thing, but… have you tried just talking to him? Telling him straight that he crossed a line and you’re no longer interested?”

You raise your head, look at her. The long, hard laugh you let out at that is _savage_ and has Blue yelling _“Okay! Okay!”_ until you stop.

“You’re a riot,” you deadpan.

She rolls her eyes. “Okay, look—I know you hate psychics, but maybe someone I know can help. Calla’s ability is psychometry; surely she’ll be able to just touch me and know instantly if I was manufactured inside K’s dream meth warehouse or wherever.”

“He doesn’t ‘manufacture’ shit, Sargent. He just dreams it and it pops into existence. That’s how it works.”

“Okay, whatever. Point is, psychics can help.” Blue covers her mouth as she yawns and peers at her watch. “I gotta get going. I’ll talk to Calla tomorrow. If she doesn’t find anything wrong with me, maybe consider that it’s just a sadistic hoax. Good news is: your friends aren’t dead and replaced with identical copies. Bad news is: you still got a really scary fuckboy admirer.”

“I’m not taking any chances,” you mumble, and she nods. “We’re keeping Gansey and Adam out of this.”

“I figured.”

“Yeah.”

She gets out of the car and, before she slams the door, catches sight of your dissected phone in the backseat. She says wryly, “I can’t contact you if you don’t fix your phone.”

“I’ll get on it,” you snarl, and she actually smiles, like it’s something approaching camaraderie from you after so many weeks of pointless, territorial malice. And as she walks to her front door and slips inside without so much as a backwards glance, it hits you that you’ve made a pact with Blue and that she’s your greatest ally right now. Not Gansey, not Adam, not Noah. Just Blue.

You reach into the backseat for your phone and fit all the pieces back together with the caution and solemnity of assembling a loaded gun. You click the battery in, thumb the power button. After a few tense seconds you’re thankful to find that the phone has stopped ringing off the hook and there are no new abusive voicemails for you to collect. But after another minute, the texts start to pour in. You dare to check one. Then another. And another. And another.

It’s the same over and over. The same message, the same countdown ‘til morning. _If you’re not at the fairgrounds by 6…_

Six am still gives you plenty of time to put it off.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hmu at [tungle](http://telekinesiskid.tumblr.com/)


End file.
